Years back we were sacked over the phone. We’d set up a piece in a key trade title involving an interview with a member of staff from ABC, our client company.

ABC recommended a staff interviewee, whom we briefed. He told us he got what we all wanted to say. But when the interview began he spent the entire time slagging off his employer. He clearly had a grievance and this was his opportunity to air it. Short of faking a medical emergency there was nothing we could do. The magazine printed it, and the day it came out was the day I took the call telling us we were fired. The marketing contact knew we were being made a scapegoat but couldn’t speak in our defence. It was that kind of company.

I hung up and sat there seething. “Are you mad?” a colleague asked me.

“You bet I am,” I replied.

“Well, why don’t you pick up the phone right now and ring XYZ?” she said. “You know they don’t have an agency of their own.”

XYZ was ABC’s chief competitor.

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So I made the call. In five minutes I’d fixed a meeting, and less than a week later – no invitation to tender, no proposal, no pitch – we had a new client. It turned out that it had been envious of the coverage we had been getting for ABC. It was delighted and so were we.

What’s the point of this story? Don’t get mad, get even? Nope. It’s an extreme example of something far more specific to PR and something that’s more common than the occasional unjust client. I refer to the problem of measurement.

Somebody pass me that ruler

Marketing communications is a woolly discipline. Who knows the effect it has? Did that ad, that brochure, that piece of coverage really clinch that customer purchase? That’s why we spend so long measuring things. It’s a bid for self-justification, and it’s generally no easier in PR than it is in, say, advertising.

But if measuring the effectiveness of results is hard, so is calculating the time we spend achieving them. It’s been pointed out in this column that timesheets bring all kinds of personal benefits to the way we can organise our day – and our free time. Well, that’s absolutely right. But the main purpose of timesheets is to give the management and finance teams a feel for our effectiveness and in particular for whether we’re over-servicing a client. The problem is that gauging these things against the hands on the clock is woefully inexact.

Take my example above. We spent the best part of a day selling in, prepping for and attending an interview that resulted in a piece of coverage that was disastrous on just about any metric. We then spent less than two hours winning a replacement client that made a significant difference to our agency revenue for several years.

But what did the timesheet show? That we spent five hours longer than we should have done that month on client ABC, only to be sacked. And we only spent somewhere around 90 minutes on new business, which was less than our allocation. It was effective, but it still didn’t meet the quota.

The problem with time in PR is that all minutes aren’t the same. I can spend three hours in a directionless client meeting and wind up over-servicing the client with nothing to show for it. Or I can pick up the phone to a national paper and strike lucky, catching the right person at the right time to fix a piece of coverage in just five minutes that will make us stars for months.

But there’s a bigger problem with time in PR: Tina. Historians will remember this was one of Margaret Thatcher’s many nicknames. It’s short for her don’t-argue-with-me dictum: There is no alternative.

The bottom line is we have to measure the time we spend. There is no alternative, because if we don’t we can lose money and end up working for nothing. Even though timesheets can be pointless. Even though client politics are such we sometimes don’t dare mention we need to cut back by 20% on time to bring the account back in line with the fee. And even though no one wants to admit that we spend so long on timesheet admin that it ought to be a line item in its own right.

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There has to be a better way

My own view is that there’s a middle way. Let’s not timetable every minute but just get a feel for how we’re doing on the main metric, which is fee against time. And let’s not worry too much about quantifying anything non-billable. All this may be less scientific but it’s more real-world.

And by the way: about a year after ABC sacked us the marketing contact called me. “Water under the bridge,” he said. “Can we talk?”

I gave myself a moment before telling him about us and XYZ. I’ve never forgotten those few wonderful seconds. And they didn’t even appear on a timesheet.